At both IDF09 and SC09 some of the most interesting presentations were on balanced computer systems, systems where there is no component (CPU, memory, network, storage, etc.) grossly over or under allocated, an important property if the system must support a variety of applications. (If a single application is only ever going to be run then it may make sense to over allocate resources most critical for that application.) In this article, a research group competing in a terabyte sort competition talks briefly about balanced systems. Disk is known to be terribly slow and to create their balanced system they incorporated 16 disks into each compute node.

In my own workstations, despite trying to be smart about the incorporation of SSDs, 10k HDs, and RAID, disk is still the limiting factor in many of my research applications. I've toyed with the idea of populating an external drive enclosure and using a large hardware RAID controller to bring storage throughput closer to being balanced. What steps have you done to improve your workstation storage performance?